The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging... Read More

Articles by Zia Mian

In this essay, adapted from his 2014 Linus Pauling Legacy Award Lecture, Zia Mian, from Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, argues that the ideas Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and other scientists struggled hard over the decades to teach the world have now become widely

The International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) is in the process of finalizing an analysis of the policy and technical challenges faced internationally over the past five decades by efforts at long-term storage and disposal of spent fuel from nuclear power reactors. These challenges have so far prevented the licensing of a geological spent fuel repository anywhere in the world.

The recognition of the need for nuclear disarmament and the question of how to achieve it are as old as the nuclear age. In June 1945, before the first nuclear weapon had been built, in what became known as the Franck Report, a group of scientists working on the U.S. atomic bomb program warned that:

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, nuclear energy advocates have dreamed of a reactor that could produce more fuel than it used. More than 60 years and $100 billion later, that vision remains as far from reality as ever.

Proliferation watchers have kept track of A. Q. Khan's activities for about 30 years. In 1979, the Washington Post named him as the Pakistani engineer who had left his position at the uranium enrichment centrifuge facility at Almelo, Netherlands, four years earlier with "lists of subcontractors and probably blueprints for the plant." Khan then returned to Pakistan, where he soon became director of the country's secret uranium enrichment project at Kahuta, near Islamabad, and a key player in its nuclear weapons program.